Tag Archives: Free-to-play

Freemium games are rampant across game downloading services such as Google Play or the App Store. These games, which are free to download and play, usually force one to pay for items in the app itself, such as weapons or premium currency to buy said weapons. When it’s all said and done, these games aren’t “free to play” as they are advertised.

However, this is not the case with Kritika: The White Knights, a free-to-play hack n’ slash game developed by South Korean publisher Gamevil. I find this a welcome departure from the endless wave of games that force you to pay to git gud.

In most games, to get premium currency, you play the game for what seems like forever and you get maybe three or four pieces of it. In Kritika, you can earn 25 karats, the premium currency, per day per character. They don’t force you to spend your hard-earned money on a game.

They also give you a chance to buy special weapon packages every five levels. Thankfully, by then, you’ve had enough chances to get that Legendary-grade weapon, so you don’t have to spend money.

This is just one of the reasons I love Kritika. The other is that the gameplay, though it’s just the simple formula of attack and use skills, is addicting at its core. Games don’t need to have a complicated attack, block etc. combat system to be good. In addition, the skills are eye-popping. Killing an enemy rewards one with a satisfying flash of color and the game itself isn’t over-challenging, even in later levels where enemies deal anywhere from 1,000 to 20,000 damage.

Even when run on minimum system requirements, the app still runs almost flawlessly, which is a surprise with how much goes on on screen at one time. There are usually 20 to 30 enemies on screen at once and they attack almost simultaneously. The graphics are also great for a mobile game, with an endearing comic-book style.

My one complaint about the game is its lack of a story. Before a stage, there’s some text that gives you a small idea of what’s happening, but mostly you’re just thrown into a stage without an idea of what’s actually going on. At the beginning of the game, however, it gives you a background story that you can keep track of easily.

All-in-all Kritika is a great F2P (free-to-play) game that people who don’t have a credit or debit card can enjoy as much as people who do.